The BBC reports that the Oxford English Dictionary has added 500 new words for June 2015, including "twerk," a word that has seen use as far back as 1820, when Charles Clairmont wrote that "Germans do allow themselves such twists & twirks of the pen, that it would puzzle any one." The "twerk" spelling was used in 1901.
Other "new" words and phrases include choss, cisgender, depanneur, e-cig, ecotown, fap fap fap, FLOTUS, fo' shizzle, freegan, gimmick ("to mean 'a night out with friends'"), guerrilla ("describing activities carried out in an irregular and spontaneous way"), intersectionality, inukshuk, keener, mangia-cake, meh, SCOTUS, shipping ("the activity of discussing, portraying, or advocating a romantic pairing of two characters who appear in a work of (serial) fiction, esp. when such a pairing is not depicted in the original work"), Special Olympics, stagette, tenderpreneur, twitterati, uncanny valley, voluntourism, webisode, and yarn bombing.
The full list for June 2015 can be found here. Previous OED updates are here. Revisions are made every March, June, September, and December.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday June 26 2015, @01:44PM
Those of us who write and those of us who read. That said, if a word has never been used in a book the OED and Websters shouldn't touch it.
Larry Paige thinks his kid coined "google" in the late 1990s, but Mark Twin used it a hundred years earlier in "Huckleberry Finn". Amusingly, in Twain's book it means "drip slowly out". It reads "The duke he never let on he suspicioned what was up, but just went a goo-gooing around, happy and satisfied, like a jug that's googling out buttermilk..."
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